Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and International Security) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Foreign Affairs. I refer to his statement to parliament that the United Nations had only raised with the government a general concern about contracts of the Australian Wheat Board and that, when the opposition talks about the warning bells, it picks out obscure documents. Minister, I refer to another obscure document, a third cable of 11 March 2000, containing a further warning to the government concerning the AWB’s activities in Iraq and one which is explicitly copied to the secretary to the minister’s department. Will the minister confirm to the parliament that this further warning from the United Nations stated that the representative of the office of the Iraq program ‘had received an insufficient response to enable her to close the matter and that it was imperative that this matter be put to rest’? What action did the minister himself take to ensure that these sets of warnings conveyed by the United Nations had been comprehensively addressed?

Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Again, I thank the honourable member for his questions—two in a row on this topic—and I appreciate that enormously. Yes, this is another one of the cables that have been tabled today in the Cole commission. The 11 March cable, which is from Austrade back to Canberra, is about the same issue. It is not a separate issue; it is the same allegation made by, as it turned out—I said earlier the Canadian Wheat Associates; that was a mistake—the Canadian Wheat Board. It is the same issue. I made this point earlier: in order to round off their investigation, the United Nations wanted access to contracts that they had not had access to in the past. Why AWB Ltd had not passed them those contracts, I do not know. That is the sort of thing that will be considered by the Cole inquiry, as indeed will all of this. But what I do know is that, through this period, the department was quite assiduous in making sure that it furnished the United Nations—which was responsible for the administration of the oil for food program—investigators with the material they asked for. I made the point earlier, by the way, and it is quite an important point, that AWB Ltd was a little reluctant initially to provide the department with these documents to pass on to the UN.

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Members may laugh. They may think: ‘We all know why now.’ We certainly did not know then. Subsequent to this cable of 11 March, that information was obtained—you can see in the reporting of this cable; it tells the story quite clearly—and it was given to the United Nations. The United Nations read those contracts and said that, as a result of that, the matter was closed. Whilst at the time of the conversation in Washington, reported in the 11 March cable, the matter had not been closed according to the United Nations, when DFAT subsequently obtained the information they wanted, the United Nations closed the matter.

I would have thought that the allegation that departmental officers of DFAT, me—the minister—the Minister for Trade and the Prime Minister had all been negligent was the exact reverse to what these cables showed, that people were assiduous in following up inquiries, obtaining information and ensuring that these matters were investigated to the fullest extent possible. Of course, if the opposition had had its way, it would have left the oil for food program in place indefinitely, along with its friend Saddam Hussein.